I wanted to like this game. It's too repetitive. The only draw to this is the Viking flavour. If you've played any other colony-building/town-management game, you've played this one. Town creation is engaging enough, but the penalties for failure are absolutely unforgiving. Every single thing contributes to citizen approval or dislike, and the negatives outweigh the positives. If you get into a negative spiral, it's hard to recover. The biggest drawback that I can't seem to overcome is homelessness. As soon as a citizen indicates they are homeless, I build a few houses. However, these are instantly populated, increasing the population but seemingly not providing a home to the homeless person. If your villagers leave, you lose Fame and quickly lose the game. People die, whether through war, natural causes, illness, or injury, but their houses remain occupied as long as there's one family member there, including even a single infant (this happened... baby living by itself). On top of that you have incoming travelers or refugees or newcomers, whatever you want to call them. If you reject them, you lose Fame, which is what drives your Tree of Life points that you need to improve your society/technology. If you accept them, you need a lot more houses. This would better benefit from some sort of prompt to build that specific homeless person a home, and lock it to that individual and their family, if any. Having some sort of barracks for unmarried troops would be a decent idea as well, to help handle housing issues. The other issue with housing is that there's only so much space on a map. Having 500 houses for 500 citizens/families occupies a massive chunk of real estate. Combat in this game is relegated to what amounts to choose-your-own-adventure cards, where you get a series of cards presenting an option (recon, wait, go in at night) and a chance for success. Press a button, random number gods decide if you succeed or fail. I don't believe the percentages, either--I've had 35% chance of success be wildly successful, and 89% chance of success fail miserably. That is how combat goes, you don't manage the fighting any other way unlike other RPG/RTS titles.

I wanted to like this game. It's too repetitive. The only draw to this is the Viking flavour. If you've played any other colony-building/town-management game, you've played this one. Town creation is engaging enough, but the penalties for failure are absolutely unforgiving. Every single thing contributes to citizen approval or dislike, and the negatives outweigh the positives. If you get into a negative spiral, it's hard to recover. The biggest drawback that I can't seem to overcome is homelessness. As soon as a citizen indicates they are homeless, I build a few houses. However, these are instantly populated, increasing the population but seemingly not providing a home to the homeless person. If your villagers leave, you lose Fame and quickly lose the game. People die, whether through war, natural causes, illness, or injury, but their houses remain occupied as long as there's one family member there, including even a single infant (this happened... baby living by itself). On top of that you have incoming travelers or refugees or newcomers, whatever you want to call them. If you reject them, you lose Fame, which is what drives your Tree of Life points that you need to improve your society/technology. If you accept them, you need a lot more houses. This would better benefit from some sort of prompt to build that specific homeless person a home, and lock it to that individual and their family, if any. Having some sort of barracks for unmarried troops would be a decent idea as well, to help handle housing issues. The other issue with housing is that there's only so much space on a map. Having 500 houses for 500 citizens/families occupies a massive chunk of real estate. Combat in this game is relegated to what amounts to choose-your-own-adventure cards, where you get a series of cards presenting an option (recon, wait, go in at night) and a chance for success. Press a button, random number gods decide if you succeed or fail. I don't believe the percentages, either--I've had 35% chance of success be wildly successful, and 89% chance of success fail miserably. That is how combat goes, you don't manage the fighting any other way unlike other RPG/RTS titles.